1 84 Prehistoric and Savage Man 



shouted he too may have an image of the Hon and be 

 alarmed. But although the sound has thus become a sign 

 for the dog, just as any other sound — rustle in the grass, 

 thud on the ground, or growl — the sound is not for him 

 a word, a symbol, an idea. It is not an abstract general sign. 

 It cannot be thought.' Man alone then has rational speech, 

 and therefore reason, of which it is the sign. Now as we see 

 in human immaturity and infirmity, wherever intellectual 

 activity exists, it seeks external expression by symbols — 

 verbal, manual, or what not — the language either of voice or 

 gesture. 



It follows then that the second assertion above quoted, 

 'Speech begot reason' cannot possibly be maintained. For 

 just as some form of symbolic expression is the necessary 

 consequence of the possession of reason by an animal frame, 

 so it is impossible that true speech can for a moment exist 

 without the co-existence with it of that intellectual activity 

 of which it is the outward expression. As well might the 

 concavities of a curved line be supposed to exist without its 

 convexities, as the oral word be supposed to have arisen 

 prior to that mental word which it represents. Moreover, 

 speech requires an apprehending intelligence on the part of 

 the hearer as well as on the part of the speaker, if it is to be 

 more than a monologue ; and we may consider it certain that 

 speech could never have arisen had not two persons pos- 

 sessed the same idea at the same time. 



How is language invented now ? Do men give utterance 

 to unmeanmg articulate sounds and subsequently annex new 

 ideas thus generated to them ? Is not the fact, as before 

 observed, notoriously the other way ? 



It is of course true that infants learn to speak words the 

 meanings of which they do not understand ; but in the first 

 place they learn them from those who do know and who 

 make kno^vTi to them by degrees their meaning ; and in the 



